On Jan 6, 9:15 am, Dan <[email protected]> wrote: > At 1:20 AM -0600 1/6/2010, David Colvin wrote: > > >I initialize the hard drive on my iBook about twice a year. I just > >love that "zippy" new computer feel after a good scrubbing. > > Reformatting a running drive shouldn't be necessary and is not > advised. Reformatting involves blowing away the soft bad-block map > (the hard, aka manufacturer's, map is retained). That leaves you > with a file system that will potentially use marginal blocks for your > data.
format and initialize are two separate things. Initialize creates a new partition map, drivers, etc. Older hard drive tools like APS powertools I have has those two steps separated. I have been told that a low level format is a good idea about every five years. Because, new bad blocks do happen, This is supposedly to apply to SCSI drives. However I learned the trick for ide drives in osX to erase the entire hard drive that updating the bad block list. I had several drives that would hit a bad spot and crash the machine (also showed up in the smartctl log if you download/ build the full program -- tells you the exact blocks -- I used to just format around them -- note this program also available in Linux/NetBSD) I just got a 2GB scsi in a box at thrift store for $4 last week and it was flaky so I did the low level. Took a few hours on a g3 book running os9... Note you can test the drive with the option "write zeros" see if it hangs anywhere, although classic OS won't tell you where, osX might (if you have a scsi card in there to test it with) - if it doesn't crash the machine... > > The performance improvement, with the classic Mac OS, comes from the > out-and-back defrag. Backup, initialize the drive, reload it - the > files are put on contiguously. Mostly, something like 80 or 90 %. (I've tried it first this way then with PlusOptimizer after which shows the frags. Also the drive should not be too full... Unnecessary under OS X, as the same > performance improvement there comes from running simple maintenance > tasks. OS X does the important defragging automatically. > Hmm. So they say, never seen it documented though. One reason to partition is to keep things organized if your drive is small -- keeping the system files and applications that should be stable separate from personal data files. With today's humoungous drives probably fragmentation never happens, unless its supposed to (something about picking up pieces on the fly).
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